Nintendo To Publish The Last Story, Mistwalker RPG

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Nintendo To Publish The Last Story, Mistwalker RPG

Images courtesy Nintendo

Nintendo will publish the latest game from the creators of Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey on Wii, it said Friday.

The Last Story, which Nintendo calls a "full-scaled RPG," will be released for Wii this year. It is the next creation of Mistwalker, the role-playing game development studio started in 2004 by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. More information on the game will be available in March, according to the official site.

(Yeah, yeah, I know – it's not the final fantasy, it's the last story. They're barely even trying to hide it anymore.)

"We are working with Mistwalker in order to seek a new form of RPG by choosing the universal theme of human emotion," Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said at a financial briefing in Japan. Since this briefing was meant to put a happy little spin on the fact that Nintendo's operating income has dropped 40% since the same period last year, we should have expected some tidbits of 2010 news.

Nintendo also took the opportunity to detail another Wii RPG – Xenoblade, coming from Nintendo subsidiary (and Xenosaga creator) Monolith Soft. Set to launch this spring, it is another "full-scaled RPG."

It was originally shown at E3 2009 with the title Monado: The Beginning of the World. But one little switcheroo and it'll probably sell twice the copies. Nintendo's not even going to bother saying that the name change is a coincidence. "We decided to call it Xenoblade to honor Mr. Tetsuya Takahashi who poured his soul into making this and who has been working on the Xeno series," said Iwata.

So Nintendo is betting on two RPGs with serious pedigrees to curry favor with fickle Japanese hard-core gamers this year. I would think these would both be safe bets for U.S. release. I would think that, I mean, if Nintendo of America wasn't as capricious as a Japanese hard-core gamer. NoA did shitcan Monolith's DS role-player Soma Bringer, so it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Other tidbits of Nintendo news to come out of the conference: Metroid: Other M will be released this summer in Japan (and check out the awesome teaser site!). Golden Sun DS will be released there in 2010, and so will Super Mario Galaxy 2. The next entry in the Pokemon series will debut in Japan at the end of the year. And Nintendo will show the new Wii Zelda and the software for the Vitality Sensor at E3 2010.